Page 23 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I love her. It's simply best described as complicated.
I start to dial.
I get through four digits before I stop.
Because the moment I make this call, the quiet ends. The moment someone in my world knows where I am—even my mother, who loves me and who would never intentionally—the information starts moving. It gets to the wrong person or the right person at the wrong time, and suddenly there are questions I don't have answers to yet and decisions I haven't made and a version of events I haven't had the chance to construct for myself.
My mother will want to know what happened. And then she'll want to know what the plan is. And then she'll want to know what I'm going to say publicly, because my mother has never once in her life separated those two questions.
I set the handset back in the cradle.
Not yet. I'm not ready yet.
I stand there for a moment looking at the phone, and then I think about the two days of headlines and statements and whatever machine Dawson has been running in my absence. I've been completely insulated from it by geography. Part of me hasbeen grateful for that. Part of me knows I can't stay insulated forever.
I find Lila in the clinic doing inventory and knock on the open door. "Is there any internet up here? A computer I can use?"
She looks up from her clipboard. "No Wi-Fi, the signal doesn't reach. We use a private satellite network for our phones, but standard cell service is dead up here. But the pack office off the main room has a laptop hardwired to a satellite dish. It's slow, but it works." She tilts her head, reading something in my features. "Help yourself."
"Are you sure? I don't want to?—"
"I'm going to be in here for the next hour at least." She waves a hand toward the door. "Go ahead."
She nods and goes back to her clipboard, and I head back out to the lodge.
I sit down at the desk in the pack office and wake up the hardwired laptop. I stare at the open browser for a moment longer than necessary. I've known this computer and the landline were here for days. I just hadn't been ready to plug back into the world until now.
Then I type my own name into the search bar.
The results load immediately, and there are a lot of them.
Bride Vanishes Hours Before Ceremony — Whitaker Wedding Scandal Grows
Harper Collins: Breakdown or Runaway? Sources Close to Developer Speak Out
Dawson Whitaker Breaks Silence on Missing Fiancée
I click the last one first, because I am practical even when I don't want to be, and practical means starting with the thing that's going to be the worst.
It's a video. A press statement, formal and composed, showed Dawson in a charcoal suit standing in what appears tobe the lobby of one of his buildings. He looks concerned. That's the performance he's chosen, and he's good at it. Concerned and slightly pained, Dawson is being very gracious about a difficult situation, which is a thing Dawson is extremely good at performing.
"Harper has been under significant stress in the lead-up to the wedding," he tells the camera, his voice measured and careful. "I believe the pressure became overwhelming, and she needed to step away. I'm not angry. I'm worried about her well-being, and I hope she reaches out when she's ready."
I watch it twice.
The second time, I pay attention to what he doesn't say. He doesn't sayI love her.He doesn't saysomething happened between us. He saysstress and pressure and overwhelming—words that are technically neutral and functionally not, words that build a picture of a woman who couldn't handle her own life, who panicked, who ran.
Not a woman who walked into a private room and found her fiancé kissing someone else—hands on her face, eyes closed, completely absorbed—while two hundred guests waited downstairs for a ceremony that was never going to happen.
Not a woman who scrolled through eight months of messages on a phone that wasn't hers.
Nothing more than a woman who panicked.
I close the laptop harder than I mean to. Too angry to fully execute anything.
For a moment, I sit there, looking at the fire. There's a particular kind of anger that doesn't run hot—it runs cold and flat and very clear, and that's what's moving through me right now. This anger has had time to settle into itself. Two days of mountain quiet, and now I can see the full shape of what was done to me—and that particular kind of anger runs considerably deeper than the immediate kind.
He knew exactly what he was doing when he stood in front of that camera. He always knows exactly what he's doing.
